Email is helpful but can also be distracting. If we don't handle it properly, it can dominate our life and impact our productivity by interrupts our concentration. Let me share some practices I have used to organize my emails.
What worked was to keep your email process simple.
Create a simple folder structure. My favorite folders only have 8 folders: an Inbox, a Sent box, a Flagged folder, a Draft folder, a Templates folder, a Subscriptions folder, a Saved folder, and the Archived folder. Let's look at each of them:
Turn Off Email Notifications. You don't need them. Instead, plan when to check emails. I check email twice daily, at the beginning and end of the day, during my morning/afternoon review time.
Apply the OHIO. ("Only Handle It Once,") method and 2-minute rule: process email once, and if you can respond to an email in 2 minutes, do it immediately.
The lesson learned is to avoid organizing your email per project. When we have many projects, handling every one of them to decide where the email should go can easily cause stress. It is realistic to clean up the inbox weekly rather than daily because some emails are not urgent for review or need batch processing per week.
Enjoy your productive email handling.
Create a simple folder structure. My favorite folders only have 8 folders: an Inbox, a Sent box, a Flagged folder, a Draft folder, a Templates folder, a Subscriptions folder, a Saved folder, and the Archived folder. Let's look at each of them:
- Inbox and Sent are the default ones to hold emails coming in and out.
- Flagged as a smart folder lists all emails with a flag. I flag emails when they don't need immediate action or are better processed in batch.
- Draft keeps email drafts. For important emails, I prefer to save them in Draft for one or two hours and do a second read before sending them out. One reason is to avoid emotional attachment and any apparent mistakes.
- Template holds the frequently used email templates such as announcements and meeting minutes.
- Saved folder keeps important emails containing valuable information.
- Subscriptions preserve all email subscriptions categorized automatically by the server-side rules and are used for batch process. This is after we unsubscribed unnecessary subscriptions.
- Archived archives processed emails. I create a quarterly folder with a sent box for the archive folder, with the root folder taking all the incoming emails and the sent box capturing all the outgoing emails. That's it. The setup allows you to make easy decisions (or avoid decision fatigue) and easily clean up your inbox whenever needed. Depending on your email volume, you may change the older to be yearly or monthly.
Turn Off Email Notifications. You don't need them. Instead, plan when to check emails. I check email twice daily, at the beginning and end of the day, during my morning/afternoon review time.
Apply the OHIO. ("Only Handle It Once,") method and 2-minute rule: process email once, and if you can respond to an email in 2 minutes, do it immediately.
The lesson learned is to avoid organizing your email per project. When we have many projects, handling every one of them to decide where the email should go can easily cause stress. It is realistic to clean up the inbox weekly rather than daily because some emails are not urgent for review or need batch processing per week.
Enjoy your productive email handling.
Editor's Notes: Check the Today smart mailbox by Apple Mail when you can review today's emails occasionally.
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